Yesterday and today were all about biochemistry: separating and isolating proteins. Our instructors have been really impressed by the quality of our protein gels so far…beginner’s luck, I say. I held my breath when loading the tiny quantities of liquid into these tiny wells in these gels. Check out my first DNA gel:
I got a taste for BLAST searches today and learned a bit about what ‘bioinformatics’ is about. Pretty powerful stuff. The college courses I took in biology were in the mid-1990s—pre-human genome project—so this revolution in using software to mine genomes and proteomes has until today remained largely a mystery to me. It was only a small taste, but at least I gained a bit of appreciation for the field.
Congratulations, Corie! That’s a nice looking gel. Let me be the first to welcome you to the marvelous world of agarose gels! They get to be fun, after you do about 10 billion of them :) Science is hard, I agree whole-heartedly.
Definitely agree. Funny story, although not so when it happened, from my old lab: months of cloning, fermentation, purification and extraction, plus several PhD students, yielded precious microlitres for loading into a gel… the shaker was unfortunately turned up too high during the staining process and the gel was broken up into many many small pieces…
Corie: If you want more experience in bioinformatics, MBL also has classes in basic bioinformatics if I remember correctly. It’s a great place!
Wow, Li Kim, if that happened to my gels, after months of hard work, I would have gone home and cried. I’m really not cut out for this kind of work!
I just recently performed an IMAC chromatography and proceeded with the separation of the proteins using SDS-Page electroforeses gel. It all went fairly well, it was my first time to do the whole protocol from start to finish. I was also very proud of my gel when I was done. :)
I didn’t do the Western Blotting, but that I had done already in an immunology lab class :)
Congrats on the great gel! It looks great. Good resolution, too!